Harmonium (poetry Collection) - The Cool Master

The Cool Master

Louis Untermeyer, suspicious of international influences on American poetry, criticized Stevens in 1924 as a "conscious aesthete" at war with reality, achieving little beyond "an amusing precosity". He can only "smile indulgently" at the "childish" love of alliteration and assonance in "Chieftan Iffucan of Azcan in caftan" or "Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns", and he is irritated by the confusing titles: The Emperor of Ice Cream, The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage, Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs. On the evidence of the exquisite miniature "Tea", Alfred Kreymberg had been led to expect a "slender, ethereal being, shy and sensitive," according to Milton Bates, who continues, "the poet he actually met at a social gathering for Rogue contributors stood over six feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds."

To the caricature of "aesthete" Gorham Munson added "dandy" in "The Dandyism of Wallace Stevens", objecting to what he took to be Stevens's indifference to political and social issues of the era. Munson was impressed by the influence of French: "The whole tendency of his vocabulary is, in fact, toward the lightness and coolness and transparency of French." In view of suspicions about international influences at that time, this may have been unfortunate praise. However, Stevens would have accepted it, having written in Adagia, "French and English constitute a single language."

The epithet "dandy" became "hedonist" in Yvor Winters's 1943 essay "Wallace Stevens, or the Hedonist's Progress", which objected that Stevens did not give primacy to the intellect or to orthodox Christian beliefs. Winters characterized Stevens as "a cool master", in an essay with that title, in which he describes Stevens as "this greatest of living and of American poets".

Possibly the most disgruntled reader of Stevens's early poems was the Irish-American poet Shaemas O'Scheel, the author of an Irish war poem, They Went Forth to Battle, But They Always Fell. Reviewing Stevens's poems that appeared in the "War Number" (November 1914) of the journal Poetry. O"Sheel, writing in a competing journal, condemned the entire "War Number" but cited Stevens's Phases in particular as "an excellent example" of poetry that is "untruthful, and nauseating to read."